An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
An alphabetical guide to Lacan's key terms, tracing each concept across his career.
It is not meant to be a substitute for reading Lacan, but a companion to such reading.
Dylan Evans compiles over two hundred entries covering the vocabulary Lacan built across his seminars and writings, from the mirror stage and the objet petit a to the registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and real. Each entry follows a term from its first appearance through the shifts it undergoes as Lacan reworks it, and sets it against its sources in Freud, Saussure, Hegel, and Jakobson. Cross-references connect related terms, and a chronology places the concepts within the arc of Lacan's teaching and his breaks with the psychoanalytic institutions.
Evans treats these terms as clinical instruments rather than abstractions, keeping the analytic situation in view even where the theory turns most linguistic. For a practitioner, the dictionary supplies a reliable point of entry when a reference in Lacan's prose proves opaque, and a way to check how a single word carries different weight at different moments. The entries stand alone, so a clinician can turn straight to a term met in a seminar or a case discussion.
About the author
Dylan Evans
Dylan Evans is a British author and academic born in 1966. Early in his career he trained in Lacanian psychoanalysis and wrote An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996), which became a standard reference in the field. He later came to doubt the scientific basis of Lacanian theory and moved away from psychoanalysis, taking up academic work on emotion, robotics and behavioural science. He has held university posts in England and Ireland and written popular science on emotion, the placebo effect and risk intelligence.
Details
- 1996
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 264
- 9780415135238